Tyler Volk

On his book Quarks to Culture: How We Came to Be

Cover Interview of July 12, 2017

A close-up

I recently gave a book talk at a salon held on the first
Sunday of every month at the Cornelia Street Café, in New York. (Great jazz
there, by the way.) The salon is called “Entertaining Science,” convened by
Nobelist in chemistry and all-round amazing man, Roald Hoffmann. Time was very
limited because at these Sundays there is also entertainment. I knew I could
not go through all the levels to the detail that they really deserve. After
all, these levels, I feel, should be—they are—fundamental friends we should all
know, in the cosmic sense.

I decided to experiment by flashing through 12 crucial
diagrams in the book at about five seconds each. I warned the audience
beforehand. I said it’s okay to even laugh. What is Volk doing?

The message I hoped to get across was the same message that
a casual reader paging through my book in a bookstore might notice. “Wow, there
are a lot of diagrams that look very much the same.” They differ in words, but
if placed on top of each other the essential structures look very much
identical. And they are.

These diagrams show for each fundamental level how the
things of that particular level were made from the merger of prior existing
things from the previous level. This is the recurrent pattern or process I
noted above, which I have found can take us on a journey of innovation from the
simplest things of particle physics to the complexities of culture. I failed to
earlier note something I wish now to say. I needed a word for this recurrent
process. I am calling it combogenesis. Combogenesis is the genesis of new
things from the combination and integration of prior existing things.

So, if you were browsing the book, despite its obvious
traverse across a vast landscape of different kinds of scholarship and
discoveries, you would visually see there is an integrating—architectural, to
use that word again—theme in the work. I note here for the skeptical that for
this work I reached out to disciplinary experts who voluntarily, skillfully,
and kindly, reviewed chapters that involved their specialties.

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017

It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016